The £50 Ad That Cost £1,000 ft. Heather Robinson

Anu Adegbola (00:08)
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And are first to find and use new strategies to accomplish this for their clients. And so if you're a law firm, you definitely want to give them a call. They've been one of the, not one of the first, they've been the first to get to serve a lawyer ad on ChatGPT. And we know that even with all like the fact that it's very new, you really want to be testing some of these new strategies very early. And yeah, the Ad Squire team have got inside knowledge on how to do that and have started doing that.

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Anu Adegbola (01:08)
Hello and welcome to PPC Live the Podcast. I'm your host Anu, the founder of PPC Live. And as usual, every week I I speak to a different PPC expert about an f-up that they've made, a mistake that really

made their skin crawl, but how they've actually also turned things around. We never leave things on a disappointed note. We share what was disappointing, what was the learning was, what the communication with a client was, and whether they still even were able to keep that client on after that mistake. Today I have the pleasure of speaking to Heather Robinson, who has been in the industry for many years, 20 plus years, and is actually now a freelancer, and has been successfully a freelancer for like, yeah, maybe like twelve years now.

Twelve years plus. And yeah, she shares her experience of her how she yeah made a big overspend, made a mistake on a Friday. we all know that's the that's that's the the kind of mistakes that make your your y you want to bite your teeth. and just how that com com conversation happened with the client and what the biggest learning for her was. So yeah, let's go speak to Heather.

Anu Adegbola (02:10)
Hello Heather, welcome to PPC Live the podcast.

Heather Robinson (02:12)
Hi, and thank you for having me.

Anu Adegbola (02:14)
Absolutely such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. and yeah, I was I was saying like I'm I'm recording here from Nigeria. So yeah, and even like our internet connection that we this is our third go at it. So let's hope it it lasts through. I was saying tell to Heather earlier on. But Heather, where are you recording from?

Heather Robinson (02:32)
That's right, I'm based in Harrogate in North Yorkshire in England.

Anu Adegbola (02:39)
Nice, nice. And I was just saying as well, like yeah, Yorkshire just in general is such a beautiful part of of the country. And yeah, I used to work for a company where you need to you need to go to Leeds every once in a while. And then we you know, we hung out in Yorkshire sometimes, such a beautiful part of the UK. But anyway, let's get into introducing my guest Heather to you. So yeah, Heather is a Google Ads specialist who has been helping businesses generate high quality leads since two thousand and five and as a freelance PPC consultant.

since 2012, since 2012 even. Yes. And Heather specializes in working with service businesses, B2B companies and specialist firms, helping them turn Google Ads into a reliable source of qualified inquiries. Alongside her consulting work, she also writes the freelance life on Substack, where she shares honest practical advice on building a sustainable freelance career. So

Yeah, and I actually do think like having a free having freelance resources is very useful because over the past four, five years I've just seen there have been been a boom in people wanting to, you know, go out, you know, cutting the costs for clients and not necessarily wanting to work for a brand, but having that option of working for multiple brands. What was your inspiration back without going into youth into freelancing?

Heather Robinson (03:57)
For me, was actually my dad was self-employed. So from the age of kind of eight years old, I used to help my dad out. And he'd been employed for 27 years before getting made redundant and decided to set up his own business. And I'd kind of seen how he'd been independent, been able to make his own decisions. And yeah, just from a young age, I thought I want to work for myself. That's what I want to do. But as a graduate, obviously.

Anu Adegbola (04:17)
Nice.

Heather Robinson (04:21)
You need to experience as an employed position first and you want to go on the property ladder and get a mortgage. So you need a salary. So it didn't happen straight away. Um, but after sort of six, six and a half years of being employed, that's when I thought I need to do something on my own now. So yeah.

Anu Adegbola (04:27)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nice.

Nice. And how's it been going so far?

Heather Robinson (04:42)
Great, mean 14 years under my belt, not looked back, not being tempted. I don't think I'm employable now anyway, but I've not been tempted to look at another job. I mean, it's not for everyone. I'm lucky that I've got obviously a partner as well who contributes to household income and I don't have any children, so I've got no dependents. So I do have that flexibility. But yeah, I felt that they needed like a resource for people who want to be freelance permanently. I think people think of freelancers being that.

Anu Adegbola (04:45)
Nice.

Ha ha

Nice.

Mm.

Heather Robinson (05:12)
in between jobs, cafes, but there's people that make it a sustainable living so that was kind of the idea behind the substack

Anu Adegbola (05:13)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Fantastic. And we're gonna get into talking about, you know, what we're here for, talking about F ups. But for freelancers, like, you know, you write about, you know, people getting on, you know, being freelance, what they need to be doing. What's your biggest advice? If like there's one piece of advice that, you know, you really truly believe that people freelancers should follow, what would you say it is?

Heather Robinson (05:43)
Be part of a community, build that network of people that can refer you, that can get to know you, that can work with you. The worst thing about being freelance is being on your own. And although I am self-confessed introvert, love my own company, you can't do things on your own. You do need that network around you.

Anu Adegbola (05:55)
Yeah.

Absolutely. I promise I didn't pay Heather to say that because one might think, Of course, Anu you're gonna get someone here who's gonna say being part of a community is the biggest flags for consultants. But it truly is, and you know, that's one thing I've joyfully seen the PPC Live community have of like a lot of freelancers who have you know, they have how they can ask people questions about issues you're having. Like if you're a freelancer, you you're not sitting with a team of colleagues of like, there's an issue, I'll just ask.

This team member in terms of whether they've seen that issue, you can't really do that. And so it can be very like, yeah, isolating in terms of actually really knowing what's going on or whether you've done something wrong or whether it's the Google system that has messed up. And even in general, as the PPC community has been a really lot more generous with that. I mean, I started you know about 2008. You did have to like, you know, just trial and error a lot of things. Now you get people on LinkedIn.

Twitter on the different social media will share the mistakes that they've come across and you know, and how how how others don't need to make that same mistake. So yeah, it's a really great P P C community just in general, whether it's P P C live or not. but before we also go into our our queries about, you know, the F Ups, fun fact. So yeah, Heather, what's your fun fact for us today?

Heather Robinson (07:22)
So my fun fact is my first job was teaching circus skills to children.

Anu Adegbola (07:29)
bless. That

must have been so cool. And what was the skill that you were teaching them? What particular skill?

Heather Robinson (07:36)
Mostly juggling, yeah.

Anu Adegbola (07:38)
Okay. So how many balls can you juggle? Is that 'cause I can I know two is like the simple one. How many can you do juggling there?

Heather Robinson (07:46)
So I can juggle three, which is one more than the children could juggle, so that was okay.

Anu Adegbola (07:48)
Nice. Right. Right. Exactly. I think I

only really reached children level. I can about juggle two, three, and things start going very wrong. So yeah. I should have I I could still be one of your students who needs to learn to juggle three. bless. Okay.

Heather Robinson (08:00)
Thank you.

you

Anu Adegbola (08:07)
Let's get to the crux of this conversation. We're now going to go into talking about FUPS, where the biggest learnings for people's career really is. Cause yeah, on all the social medias you get people talking about, you know, their wins and, you know, how they've done scaled their their accounts and scaled their businesses and you know, they they manage a hundred thousand dollars or million, you know, pounds of of accounts. But we really want to hear about when things go wrong. That's really where the interesting interesting stuff.

happen. So Heather, really grateful that you know you're latest on the long line of guests who are who's willing to share an F up that you've made. so yeah, without further ado, Heather, what's the F up you'd like to share with us?

Heather Robinson (08:50)
Okay, so my FUP happened around 2018. So it's probably about eight years ago now. It was an e-commerce client. We had been running meta ads for them, remarketing mostly, but they were also boosting organic content as well. So we were creating.

Anu Adegbola (08:56)
Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Heather Robinson (09:08)
sort of tailored audiences segments for them to use as audiences for their boosted promoted posts. And they would send us the organic content and say, can you boost this for 50 pounds over the weekend? And we would set it all up through ads manager, making sure that it was targeted correctly.

I set one up, similar thing, £50 budget. And because it was such a short budget and just for a weekend, I didn't check back in on it. I just left it. The dreaded set and forget. And it was three weeks later, I was due to meet the client face to face. I was going through the Google reports, the meta reports, pulling all the data ready for the meeting.

And when I logged in, I saw that this campaign had not spent 50 pounds, it spent over a thousand pounds. So 20 times their budget. And yeah, I actually felt physically sick when I saw that it had happened. And I thought at first I must have selected the wrong date range. Maybe I'm looking back over several months or something. How could this have happened? And it was...

Anu Adegbola (10:05)
this is just a company.

Heather Robinson (10:12)
It was a simpler case of the little dropdown where you select a lifetime budget or daily budget. And I should have selected lifetime, but it has gone back to daily budget. And I'd obviously not double checked it when I pressed it live. And then I left it.

Anu Adegbola (10:26)
Lord. So you Yeah, you left

it what I then this happened like over a weekend. Is that right?

Heather Robinson (10:32)
Yeah.

So I'd obviously set it going on the Friday, completely forgotten about it three weeks later. Yeah. So then I had the dilemma. What do you do? Do you tell the, obviously got to tell the client because it's spent their money, but yeah. Horrible feeling.

Anu Adegbola (10:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. So and

and but you you discovered it. Like what was the investigation that you were doing? Were you just doing like, okay, let's do me doing my, you know, business as usual, let's check the stats, how campaign is going, and that's when you discovered the overspending happened. And you'd waited w how how long I almost feel so bad, girls. So it's almost like I'm I'm doing the whole what are all the things that you did wrong that this thing happened. So sorry, I apologize, bear with me. It was like

Heather Robinson (11:00)
Yep.

Anu Adegbola (11:15)
You didn't check in for three weeks? Is that what I'm hearing?

Heather Robinson (11:18)
Yeah, so in my head, I'd set the campaign going for three days over the weekend, the lifetime budget of 50 pounds. So by the Monday, it wasn't running. So I didn't check it. I didn't check that it has stopped running, but I hadn't set an end date. I just let it run with a daily budget.

Anu Adegbola (11:29)
okay.

okay. lord, okay. So it just kept on running. You didn't send an end date. It was supposed to have ended just like on the Monday, but it kept running and it's only three weeks later that you then checked and realized it was still running. Lordy. Okay, got it. 'Cause sorry, my internet connection got cut cut you out for me for a second there. But like so okay, then what happened next? What was the conversation like with the client is to to tell them what had happened?

Heather Robinson (11:41)
Yeah.

Yeah.

So as I mentioned, I had a face-to-face meeting with them the day after and I thought this is best to tell them face-to-face, not send them an email today, I'll wait until tomorrow, sit down with them, go through it. Yeah, so I approached, just completely honest, I look, I've got a confession to make. That campaign that we ran on Facebook, it ran for longer than it should have done. We've overspent by this much. But I will make it up to you and it won't happen again.

Anu Adegbola (12:28)
Okay. Okay. So I mean in the grand scale of things, how much did it spend compared to what their usual budget for campaigns are? Was that something that really would have dented their, you know, PL or was it something that was actually co considerably like a smaller budget compared to what they usually spend?

Heather Robinson (12:51)
So from memory at the time they were spending maybe no more than £500 a month on Facebook ads. So it was well over their budget, they wouldn't be expecting that kind of bill. Plus they had the remarketing campaigns running as well in the background, so there was spend on those as well.

Anu Adegbola (12:58)
Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Heather Robinson (13:11)
I'm surprised the client didn't spot it before I did, to be fair, but I think they just didn't have the credit card bill, I'm not sure.

Anu Adegbola (13:17)
capacity.

Okay. All right. Okay. That's interesting that they hadn't. And I guess that's a a saving grace because usually I always say that the biggest thing is to be able to be the one that spots the the the error and you did this time. So yeah. So because yeah some clients themselves they fumble on that. And what was their reaction? What was the were they were they were they annoyed? Were they

Heather Robinson (13:41)
They weren't happy, but they kind of saw the funny side of it. And interestingly, I've just had a meeting with the same client today and I reminded them of this incident and they said, we actually admire your honesty and transparency in the situation. That's why we're still working together. So yeah, they saw the funny side of it and I put it right as much as I could at the time.

Anu Adegbola (14:05)
Yeah.

Yeah. So this is when fantastic. And so this is a time where you were a freelancer. So it's not like if there were other teammates or a manager that could have that that affected the situation. Okay. And so like, you know, looking back, what were you s would you say your are the signs that you missed that that made that happen?

Heather Robinson (14:07)
Yeah, they were very gracious in their reaction.

I think the mistake came down to complacency in that it was something that I set up hundreds of times before. It was just, you know, run of the mill campaign, just boost this to this audience, set it going. And I just didn't go through and double check it. And it's a while ago now, so I can't remember exactly what was going on as well at the same time, but potentially it was a Friday afternoon, clients wanting things doing, and I was too busy.

to sort of spot that mistake. So I think in terms of kind of the warning signs was not giving myself time to do it and just slowing down and just going through the set up process. As you say, when you're working on your own, you've got no one else to pick it up. There's no one else looking over your shoulder. There's no one else double checking it. It's all down to you. So it's making sure you give yourself that time to check it yourself.

Anu Adegbola (15:02)
Yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely. and so if you had if there was someone who has just made that kind of mistake, you know, a spend that was supposed to start and end after just three days that kept running for up to, as you said, three weeks, and they're panicking, they're looking at this, they're about to have that, they're their weekly meeting with their client, panicking about what to say. What's your advice to them?

Heather Robinson (15:50)
Own it just admit that you've done something wrong, that you are human at the end of the day. It's really, really tempting when you see it to panic and think, what can I tell the client? How could I come up with some excuse? Could I blame it on the platform? Could I, you know, is there someone else that I could blame it on? But really it's down to you. I mean, I don't have anyone else to blame it on, but I could have said, it was a meta update or, you know, a platform change or something like that. That would have been easy to do.

Anu Adegbola (16:01)
Yeah.

No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Heather Robinson (16:19)
but

I just think that my experience of working with clients that have had bad experiences with other freelancers or with other agencies, I don't think the agency has been a hundred percent truthful with the client. And that's, I think that's when relationships break down. So it's just been being honest. You're human at the end of the day and you make mistakes. think clients will value that honesty over you being perfect.

Anu Adegbola (16:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I think honesty is like the biggest thing. And that's a client that you still have on your books. You're still working with them, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Heather Robinson (16:53)
Yes, yeah, yeah,

yes. So I've been working with them. It's nine years now, come to 10 years. So yeah, they're still working with me. So yeah, testament to that.

Anu Adegbola (17:00)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's fantastic. is there now a process, is there like an 'cause you know, as a freelancer, you know, it's probably even more important because there's no one else, as you said, to check your work in terms of, you know, how you do things. What's like is there like a new process, a new checklist that you make sure that you go through because of that mistake that happened? What's

Heather Robinson (17:27)
Yeah, I do for...

For meta and for Google ads as well, have like a campaign launch checklist to go through and just sense check everything. And it covers everything from whether it's a lead gen campaign to an e-commerce campaign. And I use that kind of really just in that it's just part of the process of doing it. And of course we've got AI, which can help us kind of sense check things as well. You can take screen grabs and upload it and get them to sort of give you a second pair of eyes on things. But I do tend to fall back to the

Anu Adegbola (17:57)
Yeah.

Heather Robinson (17:59)
the manual checklist. just think that human element is important.

Anu Adegbola (18:01)
Yeah. Yeah.

You know what? That's probably a resource that, you know, as we said earlier on at the beginning of this the the episode about how there are loads of freelancers in the communities, loads of freelancers who are trying to find good resources and checklists that you know is that have been, you know, stress tests by other freelancers is something that is a good thing to put together. So yeah.

an idea that I just had a minute ago is that like maybe we have a PPC Live up to date 2026 checklists that we have for our community that we'll put together so that other freelancers freelancers can come and we'll it'll be like probably been an amalgamation from all the different mistakes that people have shared in terms of like the checklist of now what you should do to avoid, you know, a lot of the mistakes that we've shared on on the on the on our different episodes.

Heather Robinson (18:32)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (18:51)
So we're now gonna turn on to I'm going to go into talking asking questions about, you know, mistakes that you found other agencies have done. You know, as a freelancer, you've probably like taken on several accounts and you know had you know things that you needed to change straight away before based on mistakes other agencies have made. But before that, what's one big, you know, takeaway from your story that you'd like to share with our audience before we start talking about other people's mistakes?

Heather Robinson (19:20)
I think how you communicate with clients when the worst happens is how you do business generally. That's what's going to keep the client or send them off to somebody else.

Anu Adegbola (19:33)
Yeah, yeah. The communication is the biggest, biggest thing and doing it well, doing it honestly is what's very vitally important. I definitely agree with you on that one. Okay, we've let's put that one to bed. I feel like I kind of caused some of my gets PTSD of thinking about that mistake that made them shudder about So we we'll put that to rest, put that to bed now. Let's move on and talk about, you know, technically your wins and the things that you've seen that you've been able to be like

my God, a new client has come on board with you. You've seen some of the errors that other agencies have made and you've you've directed your clients into the right path. What are some of like one or two of like big mistakes that you or it can even be like simple mistakes that you're surprised that are kind of re keep recurring, that you keep seeing when you kind of take on a new client and start auditing the account.

Heather Robinson (20:27)
It's definitely got to be conversion tracking set up and it not being set up correctly. It just seems to be pretty much every account that I access at the moment. And I think some of it actually dates back to the switchover from Universal Analytics to GA4 with events being imported in and the switchover wasn't done correctly. So the events are tracking, but then Google's optimizing for them and

Yeah, I think the worst one that we saw was an e-commerce account and they were optimizing for people submitting the search form on their website. So that was classed as a conversion, but the actual sales is an e-commerce site. Actual sales weren't being counted as conversions. So they were optimizing their entire Google ads accounts and had been for 12 months on people just searching on the, on the, on the website. where do you even start?

Anu Adegbola (21:01)
Mm.

wow.

my god. my god, there were no but there was actually you

there and it was like so it was like a retail side a client and there was an option to actually buy and you were not up they were not optimizing towards the actual sale. Flipping hell. How does how how does someone get that wrong? Does that mean that the tag was on the wrong page?

Heather Robinson (21:29)
No, not tracking it.

So it looked like, it's very difficult to tell when you're looking back, you're trying to work out what's gone on here, but it looked like they had events set up in universe analytics and Google had automatically upgraded them to GA4, but that event, the purchase event hadn't been transferred over, but they were tracking form submit.

as a conversion thinking that that would be a sale. But the only form on the website that triggered that conversion was the search bar at the top. So it was just either, I'm not sure whether it was an agency that did that or whether it was the client themselves. I've got a feeling the client might have done a bit of DIY Google ads management at some point. So yeah, and that's.

Anu Adegbola (22:11)
And

Well I don't know.

Heather Robinson (22:22)
I mean, Google's got all that data is learned from the wrong data for 12 months. So you've got to retrain it. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (22:27)
Yeah. Yeah.

So how was that how is that retraining? So you you spotted that you set the tracking up properly and did did performance when something like tracking has been has has been set up wrong, eve how long does it take for the account to actually recover? Is there a bit of a dip in performance straight away that you need to warn the client about?

Heather Robinson (22:51)
Yeah, because essentially there's no conversion date. It's like you're starting from scratch. So it was, I mean, we only worked with the client for about five months and it only just started to pick up. the time that it started to pick up was that quiet season. So it was going to be probably another six months before they were going to start seeing some results and the client didn't want to wait that long. So it was just one of them. We put lots of working up front and then. Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (23:18)
they went on to someone else because they wanted faster results. Was there? bless. All right. any any other like annoying mistakes that you spotted and even like mistakes let's say around AI and AI usage.

Heather Robinson (23:22)
Yeah.

yeah.

Anu Adegbola (23:33)
Ha ha ha ha.

Heather Robinson (23:35)
I think the worst part of AI is actually the AI assistant within Google ads. It's just terrible. And I've seen so many accounts that are using it and letting the AI assistant write the headlines, write the descriptions, and just leaving it. And I've seen lots of campaigns that have set up and they've got maybe 10 ad groups and every ad group has the same ad text. It's all identical texts have just basically not gone in and edited any of it.

Anu Adegbola (23:41)
Ooh.

Heather Robinson (24:01)
That seems to be, that's like the new bug bearer, think, is using Google's AI system, which I'm hoping will get better because it could potentially be really helpful, but at the moment, not so much.

Anu Adegbola (24:08)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Not so much. Yeah, I think like it it just makes me think and I've said this several times, it just makes me think of the introduction of P Max and everybody how the it you know, it's it's it was just touted as, you know, the best thing to of you know, how to set up a campaign very easily and it was a such a mess.

But over the years, they've made it better, made it have more visibility, with your channel visibility and everything. It's not so much a black box. And I feel like now we are very much still in the whole, yeah, potential for all these AI assistance and AI features to be good. But we're very much still at the stage of it's a hot mess and it's gonna still take years for people to work for Google to really fiddle with, you know, their backend system and actually make it.

Heather Robinson (24:51)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (25:00)
actually make it useful. Has there been any part of like I know we talk about we you know, the the main topic here is about mistakes, but you know, talking about I think it's so almost so easy to talk about how AI a lot of usage of AI is is is going wrong. Is there a use of AI, of AI with PPC that you're actually finding that is working well?

Heather Robinson (25:21)
Yeah, so I've used Claude Code to create a search term, analyze a tool, and it saves me so much time. It means I can download. So I don't give access to the Google Ads accounts.

Anu Adegbola (25:28)
Nice.

Heather Robinson (25:32)
terrified of doing that at this stage. So, but I can download a CSV file with the month search term reports. can upload it into this tool and it will pull out sort of high intent keywords. We might want to lean into it can pull out potential negative keywords, keywords that are expensive, but not converting and it.

Anu Adegbola (25:45)
Yeah.

Heather Robinson (25:51)
It's just, it's saving me so much manual time. It does still require me to add the context and the history and understand the business. Um, but it's kind of like 80 % there. And yeah, as I say, it saves me hours every month.

Anu Adegbola (26:07)
Amazing, amazing. Yeah. Yeah. It can be good to create tools that can help you do the work better by giving it direct access to your account for it to actually do things that you should be doing. Yeah, we should really we should really be wary of that. So yeah, I hope really people like, you know, learn from that and understand to do that better. in terms of like just like our industry and talking about, you know, floors and how things are going going well, especially in our in

you know, with all these new things that Google is throwing at us, GML this year was just very like, yeah, new for Demand Gen, new for YouTube, new for P Max, new for AI Max, and you know, and even like a weeks later, just like how how do people what's your advice for people to not make mistakes to ens and but still ensure that they're still, you know, being curious enough and testing things enough, you know, in this new age of

So many new things that they could be testing.

Heather Robinson (27:09)
Yeah, I think the key is testing, isn't it? It's having, if you're working with clients, it's making sure that they understand this is a test, this is an experiment, this is a new feature and we are testing it. We can't guarantee what's going to happen because there's so many unknowns at the moment. I think, I mean, from my perspective, most of my clients are what I would call the low data. So they're either a low budget or they're a really niche business or they're a local business.

Anu Adegbola (27:12)
Yeah.

Heather Robinson (27:34)
And a lot of the new features, P max AI max, they don't fall into the, that category. If that makes sense, they don't have enough data to be able to utilize AI. In which case it's knowing that. a client comes and says, can we try this? Can we try that? It's been able to say, well, actually it's probably not right for your business and just kind of understanding whether it's going to be a good fit.

Anu Adegbola (27:34)
Yeah.

Mm.

Heather Robinson (27:57)
but I'm hopeful that some of these updates will start applying to smaller accounts. if we think back to like the smart bidding strategy strategies, max conversions, we used to have to start on max clicks to get the traffic before we could switch to max conversions, but that's changed recently. So that makes me hopeful that Google's gonna make P max and AI max search a little bit more.

Anu Adegbola (28:13)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Heather Robinson (28:23)
more

friendly towards the accounts, but yeah, not happening yet, but hopefully.

Anu Adegbola (28:26)
So business.

No, yeah, the smaller accounts and you know, like maybe like the B2B and the lead gen, which you know, you predominantly work work on, yeah, they've always seem to be overlooked in in in a lot of these like updates and and features that can be used. yeah. And even like, you know, so talking about the whole testing thing that you said, that that's what we should be doing, you know, there's a bit of like a fear of making that a big mistake, or making you know, fear of failure.

Heather Robinson (28:40)
Hmm.

Anu Adegbola (28:56)
You know, I've worked in agencies where like, you know, you'll get a manager going like, we're not allowed to make mistakes. And managers can can be really not great in that way of being able to really allow a junior person to just, you know, test and trial and test things. What's your advice for I know you don't if did you did did you reach a stage where you were leading teams before you moved freelance?

Heather Robinson (29:20)
No, I worked in house as the marketing manager.

Anu Adegbola (29:22)
Okay.

Okay, cool. But like if you were to advise as a as as a senior person, you've you've reached the you've done this for so many years, like if you were to go back to the company, I'd I'm sure you'll be seen as a senior person. What's your advice to like others like senior folks who are managing teams or so that they can inspire them to not be afraid to make mistakes? Because that's when they they won't they won't be inspired to make tests, do tests if they're scared of making mistakes. Why is it important that managers

make communicate to their juniors that it's okay to make make mistakes.

Heather Robinson (29:56)
I think making mistakes is how we learn. And it's just how we learn from day one from being a child. We learn to walk by falling, falling over. You just learn not to do that again. And I think you can learn as much, you can only learn so much from, you know, Google's training. You can only learn so much from YouTube videos. You can only learn so much from people telling you, but actually you physically doing it, seeing the results for yourself.

Anu Adegbola (30:04)
Yeah. Yeah.

Heather Robinson (30:20)
That's the only way. And I think every case is different as well. It might be that someone comes to you and says, well, if you do that, it's going to result in this, but it might not do for that client. So it might result in something else. And the only way we know is by testing it and trying it. And we might discover something amazing if we do. So why not?

Anu Adegbola (30:27)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Whatever case you're gonna if if you do, you'll discover something great. If you don't, you'll learn something. So it's never a negative thing when it comes to, you know, testing something and and and possibly making a mistake. yeah. Fantastic, Heather. That has been so great. but last question now, you know, we're done with talking about mistakes, done with talking, you know, really, really great teaching nuggets here. But like if your PPC career were a movie.

Heather Robinson (30:44)
Yeah.

Anu Adegbola (31:05)
What would the title be?

Heather Robinson (31:08)
It would have to be the long game.

Anu Adegbola (31:11)
Okay. Okay. Can

you explain why why the long game? You're in are you are you in this? Like P P C d doing page search management as a freelancer is your future? Is that is that the kind of idea you're going for?

Heather Robinson (31:22)
Yeah, I

think, I mean, I've been in 20, 21 years now. So this is the long game for me, but I think in terms of when you're working with smaller accounts, it's not a quick turnaround. is tweaks and optimizations and trials and tests. it's yeah, clients have got to be in it for the long game as well.

Anu Adegbola (31:43)
Absolutely. fantastic. I love that. The long game. That's that that's a good one. And I is that the name of an actual movie? I feel like it should be. That would sound like a really great name. I'm gonna I'm gonna look up for that. thank you so much Heather for joining us today. Like where can people find you if they wanna hear more about, you know, your the the work that you do, the writing that you do.

Heather Robinson (31:51)
Probably.

Thank

Yes, I'm on LinkedIn. So find me Heather Robinson and my sub stack is The Freelance Life on sub stack. And that's the two places where I'm most active.

Anu Adegbola (32:16)
Fantastic. And since P P C Live is very much about events, do you come to events? When's the next event that you that you have on your calendar to go to?

Heather Robinson (32:25)
So my next one will be, I'll be down at Brighton SEO for Brighton SEO and Measure Fest in October. And then I'm hoping to do some more next year as well. Being freelance, the kind of conference budget is quite small, so quite selective.

Anu Adegbola (32:32)
So

Okay.

I understand.

I was I was hoping you'd put PPC live in July on your calendar, but I don't understand. You're far out and yeah, yeah, the budget for that can be can be tough. I am doing it in the afternoon, so it's starting from one thirty. It's literally just to have so people if they can come down, they don't feel like they're gonna be coming out so late and having to stay overnight for an evening thing. So it's gonna be a daytime one this time. So I don't know if anybody

Heather Robinson (33:02)
Right.

Anu Adegbola (33:07)
in Leeds is thinking, okay, let's do spend a day in London and come back up the same day. You can come down for a P PC Live event on July twenty ninth. hopefully. That'd be lovely. Well thank yeah, well thank you so much, Heather. and yeah, that's it for now. Thank you so much and I'm sure we'll we'll catch up soon. Bye.

Heather Robinson (33:17)
Sounds great.

Thanks honey.

Anu Adegbola (33:27)
Thank you so much, Heather, for sharing that very honest and transparent experience. And yeah, remember, especially when you're using AI, ask advisor or or AI assistance. Not yet quite yet, your friend. Make sure that even if you are going to use it, double check the ads that it's creating your different ad groups, make sure that there's differentiation, there is relevancy on that ad group around the keywords, down that ad group and ensure that yeah, you've got

you know it's it's all down to you to create those campaigns so you cannot just say AI created these campaigns AI created this ads and yeah the the the client is not that that doesn't mean that the client isn't gonna get pissed up with you you are gonna be the one that has to take take the ish from them so yeah look out double check all the things that AI's been producing before you put it live so yeah for all the information in the full transcript not just the show notes yeah please go to podcast.pc

dot live for the full updates about yeah about all the details from from that fantastic episode with Heather. So in terms of PPC live events, we've just got a few weeks now left. Tickets are live and going. And our sponsor, shopping IQ, a very wonderful sponsor, have actually allowed us to say that yeah, we are for the next if you're gonna buy a ticket till the twentieth of July, they'll give you a year, a full 12 months

Free access to shopping IQ, no extra fees for at all. Twelve months. Usually see, you know, people give offers for only three months or a few months, but 12 months for a whole year, you'll be able to use shopping IQ for free. So if you're trying to figure out what CSS does and how it benefits your account, if your you know your retail accounts and yeah, you use Google Shopping, yeah, you should definitely be take advantage of this this offer. So yeah, anyone who buys a ticket.

Till July 20th, we'll be able to get a free access to shopping IQ for twelve months. So yeah, go get your tickets. We're gonna be having the event July twenty-ninth, go to ppc.live for that. They're like Scott Caruthers, Veronica Holler, Harry Fitzgerald, Charlotte Osborne, these are fantastic trainers, head of departments who are doing amazing work, who are gonna talk to us about using AI, the future of our work, programmatic.

and yeah, DSA going away, how to prepare for that. So yeah, make sure you don't miss out on that. Go to ppc.live for your ticket. Before I leave, I also like to share that I am taking on coaching clients so yeah, if you go to the marketinganu.com and yeah, go there, you know, book a 15-minute free discovery call so that we can figure out whether it's trying to build your confidence, trying to find the right contacts, you know, to to ensure you're doing your job well.

and just to grow in your field and just having the having the confidence of of asking for that promotion, asking for that pay rise, asking for to be on that exciting project that you want to be on. yeah, give me a call, let's have a chat so that we can help you overcome that hurdle, which is most of the time ourselves, our brains. The hurdle is usually within ourselves, not actually out there. So let's have a chat about that. anyway, so I hope that you enjoyed.

the show and I look forward to bringing more P P C F ups and triumphs next week. Thank you.